In France a couple of weeks ago, our circle of sisters visited and did ceremony in caves where Cathars previously underwent gradual spiritual transformation in a process that took several years. They proceeded from one cave to the next, emerging back into the World from the seventh cave, called ‘Bethlehem’, as ‘Perfect’ human beings. We were told by our guide that once this state had been achieved, they were able to leave their physical bodies at will, and as similar stories are told of Tibetan monks, Hindu gurus, Christian saints, aboriginal shamans, and many such others, I am disinclined to doubt her.

That the final cave of initiation was named ‘Bethlehem’ adds weight to my feeling that the Christic state is that of becoming fully Human. The Cathars were interested in being able to leave this world and the prison of the physical body at will. What I felt in their hill-fortress of Montségur, however, was overwhelming gratitude that we are no longer trapped in the belief in the duality of Spirit and Matter – we are now able to chose whether our incarnation is imprisonment in material existence and synonymous with suffering, or whether to become joyfully responsible for the magic of Oneness that is the birthright of Humanity..

From the Spring Equinox through the Summer Solstice to the Autumn Equinox this year, we’ve observed the Earth dealing with the energies of the Wounded Masculine. Individually as well as globally, the wounding and the compensatory behaviour caused by the illusion of powerlessness have become manifest to the extreme.

We are being tested in our resolve to believe that we can create our realities. Fukushima. The Philippines. Monanto and Big Pharma. Troops massing in the US. Harper destroying democracy in Canada. Pipelines and Fracking. We who are concerned are flooded with information – much of it contradictory, if we maintain the discipline of listening to all quarters rather than selectively ingesting that which aligns with what we already believe.

It has become clear that we can design seemingly objective scientific experiments that will tend, disconcertingly, to not only confirm our beliefs, but to even change their outcome depending on the mind-set of the humans most closely involved in data-gathering. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle inspired one of the first explosions of awareness in my barely-teen brain – that the act of perception transforms reality places enormous responsibility on us for the attitudes nourishing this perception. The old axiom that ‘Seeing is believing’ must now come with the chicken-and-egg corollary that ‘Believing is seeing’…We believe something transmitted to us through the adults who guided our first years in this body, and will then selectively perceive what we were taught. Each subsequent experience of the same genre will corroborate the initial imprinted belief, and we smugly cross our arms and mutter to ourselves ‘I knew it!’ – even if we think that we wanted another outcome to the situation.

We will often sabotage joyous and life-affirming possibilities if what we learned, and therefore what became a part of our identities, is contradictory to those potentials.

In Chinese medicine, the aspects of living systems related to Identity are represented by the Water element – the dilemma and the agony of the drop of water, fearing dissolution in the ocean. So many people are simply exhausted these days. Our kidneys and adrenal glands, the physiological manifestation of the Water element, responsible for our vital energy, are taxed as we make this shift into a new perception of Who We Are. We require much more sleep and stillness than usual in order to release, recover and adapt.

Bucky Fuller said that women are more easily connected to Unity consciousness because we are women, born of women, born of women in an unending continuity of waves… The male awareness, in contrast, is that of singularity – the drop of water. The challenge of the masculine principle, therefore, is to not feel small, powerless, defeated and viciously resentful, but rather to know that it has access to the entire energy of the Ocean if it will only release its egoic fear.

Throughout this summer and autumn, it was Water and Fire that struggled for balance around the planet: flooding and ravaging forest-fires, drought and the conflagration of war. And there was Fukushima. For almost two years now, it has been sitting, seeping 400 tonnes (105,000 gallons) of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean per day. 90 million gallons of even more toxic water are stored in makeshift containers just waiting for the next 9.0 level earthquake to hit.

With the last new moon, we’ve stepped through The Eagle’s Gate, the star Antares aligned with the Sun in Scorpio. The Snake has transformed to the Eagle as we rise through and above the distortions and lies we have believed about power and sexuality, about good and evil.

All that is toxic on this planet, in the ocean depths, lurking in cities gouged out of the insides of the Earth, in sealed bank vaults and in closed hearts – it is all rising to the light, to be seen and transformed.

I see many, many of us with deep grief in our bellies as well, and feel this as the mourning of Illusion – of all the stories we believed because they were told to us by people we trusted. Of knights in shining armour and princesses to be rescued…of the infallibility of our traditions and the ancestors who created and maintained them. It’s like finding out there is no Santa Claus. Or Virgin Mary (She presents herself to me as Mother Mary). Or that Elvis is really dead…. (He is, right? ;-))

Life on this Earth is experiencing what the Hathors (http://tomkenyon.com/) call Chaotic Nodes – the unpredictability factor has risen to such a degree that we must either become flexible or crack. We are within a portal of initiation, being tested in our ability to dance with circumstances as they occur. I feel that this could be the last of the caves – that as species and as a planet, we have arrived in Bethlehem…..

Imagine you are seaweed, moving gracefully within the turbulence of the tides – or a willow in the wind…. You are anchored securely between Heaven and Earth, and as veil after veil drops, you perceive Who You Are with greater clarity.

There is a prophecy that says that when the Earth is near extinction, the Red Race will help bring us back from the Edge and into balance. Around the planet, indigenous peoples are standing strong and rooted in their truth, resisting the imposed reality of corporate hegemony.

(Because some have asked: Anyone interested in a telephone consultation with me can now go to http://heartroot.com/store-magasin/ to order one. I will contact you soon after to set up an appointment. AND if any lovely person out there might have a laptop with Skype capabilities that they no longer need…we could really use one @Heartroot!)